Hey HN, potentially silly thought exercise here.<p>Humor me, please.<p>Considering this:<p>https://www.thegamer.com/how-ionizing-particle-outer-space-helped-super-mario-64-speedrunner-save-time/<p>Is it crazy to think a massive but not life-threatening solar flare could corrupt the blockchain?<p>I mean, we all know a solar flare could potentially disrupt electrical grids themselves that could still be repaired, but could it flip enough copies of blockchain to render the network useless?
Solar flare or internet destruction, any calamity that would result in bitcoin or any cryptocurrency going down is going to cause us a lot more problems than just that.<p>No, the real existential threat to any cryptocurrency is the breaking of its hash or cryptographic algorithm. So, if someone breaks SHA-256 or ECDSA then and only then is bitcoin hosed.<p>SHA-256 breaking would allow someone to guarantee they could mine all the blocks faster than anyone else.<p>ECDSA breaking would allow someone to work backwards from someone's public key to their private key.<p>Both of which are currently computationally secure, as we understand computing.<p>If you can do those then you've basically got an Oracle and wow, that's some monumental and theory breaking power:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_machine" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_machine</a>
Suppose there are 100 copies of the block chain, and 98 become corrupted. You only need the 2 remaining nodes to verify each other and the others would just download the block chain from them.<p>That would bring other risks like conspiring to rewrite the history (51% attack). But that risk becomes lower the more nodes there are. With 80K+ nodes currently [1], a cosmic event strong enough to kill 99% of the network would surely qualify as "life-threatening".<p>[1]
<a href="https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/historical.html" rel="nofollow">https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/histor...</a>
>Can a solar flare destroy the Bitcoin Blockchain?
No.<p>Part of the mining process is to verify the prior block, this guards against double spending, but also corruption of any kind.<p>The grid as a whole, is safe if turned off before a massive solar flare the size of the Carrington event. Computers might lose power and/or connectivity, but once everything is back up, the bitcoin network would be back up and running.